progress

I guess it had to happen eventually.  I’ve just wired some of our apartment for network.  There’s now a 10GB (Cat.7) link between the router in the cupboard and the office.  Originally there was a wireless bridge, but in order to set that up in such a way that we had good coverage I would have needed to have four routers and a bridge functioning all the time.  Now I just have one router and one bridge.

The original idea was a a good one, and one that should have worked perfectly well.  I have a router in the cupboard in the hall that handles the internet connection.  Its relatively central in the apartment, and so would have been the perfect candidate for a base station for wireless.  I would then have three more wireless repeaters in the office, bedroom and living room.  Unfortunately I use (and already had two) Netgear routers. It turns out that when bridging with them that a) the base station can’t be connected to from a PC, and b) the base station wasn’t actually able to handle three dependant routers without seriously degrading the network throughput. 

So there were two ways to proceed.  I could fuck around with more expensive routers replacing the ones I had, or I could lay a cable to the office.  We have parquet flooring here, which made it both simple and more difficult to work through.  There is space under the floor for some cabling, but I would have had to lift a lot of floor to do that.  The alternative was to go around the walls, using the small gap created between the wall, parquet and skirting boards to store the cables.  However, in order to do that I would have to rip out the door sealant and handle some tricky corner work close to the office.  I managed it though, and it has worked out pretty well.  I’m going to need to add a then second layer of sealant to the one I’ve already put there, and get some parquet pins to re-secure some of the skirting boards, but other than that its finished.I now have gigabit cabled Ethernet in the office and 802.11n wireless throughout the apartment!